Use mail merge to create and send bulk mail, labels, and envelopes

Organizations communicate with customers throughout their day-to-day operations. Communication can take different forms: welcome letters, special announcements, thank-you emails, and invoices to name just a few. The mail merge feature in Word can help organizations produce various forms of written communication more efficiently.

With the mail merge process, your organization can create a batch of personalized letters or emails to send to your professional contacts. Each letter or email can include both standard and custom content. You can choose, for example, to greet each recipient by their first name, use their mailing address, or add unique information like a membership number. All the information you use to customize the letter or email is taken from entries in your data source, which can be a mailing list.

With the combination of your letter or email and a mailing list, you can create a mail merge document that sends out bulk mail to specific people or to all people on your mailing list. You also can create and print mailing labels and envelopes by using mail merge.

Mail merge process

The mail merge process has three documents involved in creating and printing letters and emails, or labels and envelopes.

Your main documentThis document contains text and graphics (a logo or an image, for example) that are identical for each version of the merged document. An example of identical content is the return address on the envelope or in the body of a letter or an email message.

Your mailing listThis document contains the data that is used to fill in information in your main document. For example, your mailing list contains the addresses to be printed on the labels or envelopes.

Your merged documentThis document is a combination of the main document and the mailing list. Information is pulled from your mailing list and inserted in your main document, resulting in the merged document—the letter, email, labels, or envelopes—personalized for different people on the mailing list.

What kind of mailing list do you use?

Word can pull data from a variety of data sources to perform mail merge. If you don't have a mailing list, you can create one during the mail merge process. Here's a list of a few, simple data sources you can use for mail merge.

Word data fileYour Word document should contain a single table. The first row of the table must contain headings, and the other rows must contain the records you want to merge. For more information, see Set up a mail merge list with Word.

What kind of mailing list do you use?

Word can pull data from a variety of data sources to perform mail merge. If you don't have a mailing list, you can create one easily during the mail merge process. Here are few simple data sources you can use for mail merge.

Word data file - The Word document should contain a single table. The first row of the table must contain headings, and the other rows must contain the records you want to merge. For more information see, Set up a mail merge list with Word

Now that you have chosen your bulk mailing document and have your mailing list ready, you can proceed with the mail merge.